Hood Cleaning in Fresno CA

We clean the whole exhaust system, from the cooking surface to the fan on the roof, and we scrape it to bare metal instead of degreasing the surface and calling it done.

Every kitchen we service in Fresno gets the same sequence. Plastic goes over the cook line, the floor and anything that cannot get wet. The fire suppression nozzles get bagged, because caustic degreaser in a nozzle is how a suppression system fails the day you need it. Filters come off and go in the soak tank rather than getting hosed on the sidewalk. The hood and plenum get hand scraped and then washed with hot water and a caustic degreaser at low pressure, not high pressure, because pressure inside a hood just atomizes grease and drives it into the seams. We open the duct access panels and work the riser as far as they allow. On the roof the fan gets tipped back on its hinge so the housing, the blades and the underside of the curb all get cleaned. Then containment comes out, the stainless gets polished with the grain, and the kitchen goes back the way we found it.

The systems we work on across the Central Valley:

• Full service restaurants. Hoods over charbroilers, ranges, fryers and flat tops. Charbroilers are the heaviest producers in most kitchens by a wide margin.
• Fast food and quick service. High volume fryer lines that build a duct load faster than anyone expects, because fryer vapor condenses the moment it hits cool steel.
• School and hospital kitchens. Large canopy systems on a public facility inspection schedule, usually cleaned over a break or a weekend.
• Hotels, banquet halls and casinos. Multiple hoods tied into shared risers and long horizontal runs, which is where missing access panels turn up most often.
• Bakeries and food production. Lighter grease, but flour and particulate load the filters and the fan in their own way.
• Food trucks and ghost kitchens. Small systems that fall under the same fire code, and that load up quickly because the duct run is short and the cooking is concentrated.

Something we will tell you honestly: if a hood only sits over a steam table, a dishwasher or a pizza oven that produces heat and moisture rather than grease, it is a Type II condensate hood and it does not need a Type I grease cleaning cycle. Wipe it, keep the filters clean and put your money into the hood over the fryers. We are not going to sell you a schedule you do not need.

We also do not touch your fire suppression system beyond protecting it. Inspecting, servicing and recertifying it is a licensed fire protection contractor's work. If we see fusible links that look overdue or a tag that expired, we tell you and you call them.

While we are on your roof and in your alley, the rest of the property is easy to add. Most of our restaurant accounts also book commercial power washing for the dumpster pad and the grease tracked back door, and window cleaning for the dining room glass, on the same rotation.

Because we clean the parts nobody sees, and then we prove it with photographs.

Valley Wash Pros holds a 4.9 star rating across 644 Google reviews. We are licensed and insured, family owned and operated, based at 5645 W San Madele Ave in northwest Fresno, and open 24/7, which is the only way overnight kitchen work gets done properly.

The difference between a real hood cleaning and a cosmetic one lives entirely in the parts you cannot inspect from the kitchen floor: the plenum behind the filters, the duct riser above the ceiling, and the fan housing on the roof. That is exactly where we photograph before and after, so you are not taking our word for it and neither is your inspector.

A few habits that tell you who you hired. We carry our own light into the duct instead of guessing. We use a scraper before we use chemical, because chemical alone floats the top layer and leaves the varnished base coat. And we leave your kitchen dry, because a wet floor at 5am is how a prep cook gets hurt on the way in.

You get the same crew each visit, a certificate of insurance for your file, a dated service sticker on the hood, and a standing slot on the calendar so the next cleaning is booked before anyone has to think about it.

Because a grease-lined duct is a chimney packed with fuel, and a flare-up on the cook line is a lit match at the bottom of it.

Cooking vapor does not stay a vapor. It condenses on the first cool surface it touches, which is the inside of your filters, then your plenum, then the duct riser. Over weeks it dries into a hard, varnished layer that is chemically not far from candle wax. It is not slippery kitchen grease anymore. It is fuel, bonded to the steel, sitting directly above open flame.

When a fryer or a charbroiler flares, flame goes straight up into the hood. That is what the hood is for. If the duct is clean, the flame finds nothing to catch and the suppression system handles it. If the duct is loaded, the flame finds a continuous fuel path running up through the ceiling, through the roof structure, and out to a fan sitting on a membrane roof. Duct fires are hard to reach, hard to put out, and they travel inside the building envelope where nobody can see them.

This is why the grease behind the filter is the real fire risk, not the grease on the hood face. Baffle filters are designed to catch a share of it, not all of it, and whatever gets past them is already in the plenum and up the riser. A kitchen where only the filters get washed is a kitchen quietly building fuel in the one place nobody is looking.

The other thing nobody mentions: check that your baffles are seated in the rail at the right angle and that the grease trough underneath actually drains into its cup. A filter set in backwards is a filter doing half its job, and an overflowing trough puts grease straight down the inside of the hood and onto the cook line.

The rooftop fan is the other half of the story. Grease that makes it all the way up collects in the fan housing and gets slung onto the roof, where it degrades the membrane, voids roofing warranties and eventually finds a seam. We pull the fan, clean the housing and the blades, and contain what comes off rather than washing it into your drains or across your roof.

We clean kitchen exhaust systems across Fresno: the Tower District restaurants, the Blackstone and Shaw corridors, downtown, River Park, the school and hospital kitchens, and the food production facilities out toward the industrial corridor.

One local wrinkle worth planning around. Roof access in a lot of older Fresno buildings runs through a shared interior hatch or an alley ladder, and on a summer night the roof is still holding daytime heat well past midnight. We schedule the roof half of the job accordingly and we tell you at the walkthrough if fan access needs a hinge kit added before anyone can clean it properly.

Our shop is at 5645 W San Madele Ave #105 in northwest Fresno, which matters for overnight work. A 1am start only happens on time when the crew and the equipment are already in town.

If you are due for service, or you are not sure when the last real cleaning was, call or text (559) 975-8124. We will come look at the hood, open a panel and tell you honestly what is in there.

Hood cleaning in Fresno CA is our home market, but the restaurant and institutional accounts run the length of the Valley floor. We schedule routes so a single overnight covers multiple kitchens in the same town.

Regular stops include Clovis, Madera, Visalia and Hanford, plus the school and hospital kitchens in the smaller ag towns between them.

Do not see your town? We cover the whole Valley floor. Check the full service area or just call and ask.

Hood Cleaning Fresno CA

Hood cleaning Fresno CA operators book from us usually turns into the rest of the building. The dumpster pad, the grease tracked back door, the dining room glass and the parking lot are all on the same property, and all easier to handle on one recurring visit than on four separate ones. See our commercial hood cleaning page for multi-site and facility programs.

The kitchens we service run from single-hood taquerias and coffee shops to school district kitchens with three canopies tied into a shared riser. The route works the same either way. We confirm access the week before, arrive after close, and send the photo set before the sun comes up.